Pictures Of 70,000 Tinder's Female Users Have Been Leaked Online

Tinder has recently fallen victim to a massive data breach when 70,000 photos of users have been leaked on a forum for cybercrimes. However, it appears that only female users were targeted.

According to Aaron DeVera, working for cyber sexual assault for the New York City, they found out about the images on a website for malware trading. IDs of 16,000 Tinder users also appear on the site, which might be the number of affected people.

So far, we have not known why these photos are collected but the fact that they are shared on a marketplace for cybercriminals has raised concern over the possibility that they might be exploited for ill intentions. Some of the uses for the images are for creating fake accounts on other platforms or harassing the victims of the data breach.

The Facebook data breach is still fresh in people’s memory so it is not a surprise why these incidents are taken seriously.

The least scary scenario is that some developers of AI companies might gather the pictures to train their machine learning systems. Even if that is the case, the practice is still a serious violation of the victims’ privacy.

According to an official of Tinder, all of the uses of these pictures outside of the app itself were illegal and the company would do what was necessary to make sure that the pictures are removed.

DeVera thought that it would be challenging retrieving the pictures but Tinder had been offered the location of the archive.

This is not the first time Tinder fell victim to a data breach. Its API has been abused several times before. So DeVera hoped that this incident would be enough of a reason for Tinder to act to secure its users’ data.

Back in 2017, researchers at Kaggle, a subsidiary of Google, acquired 40,000 profile pictures to set up a dataset to train their machine learning models. Tinder then vowed to take action against this illegal practice.

The company said that it would take measures to prevent scraping of its data by exploiting Tinder’s API.

According to an official of the dating company, since the incident became known to Tinder, it had taken steps to deal with the abuse of its app. However, its security team did not elaborate on what kinds of measures they intend to take. The official explained that this practice was to prevent hackers from coming up with new ways to breach its system. Security experts call it security through obscurity.

A spokesperson of the company assured that Tinder worked hard to ensure the safety of their users’ information. The company was aware that security was an ever-changing issue for the whole industry, so they would change to adapt as necessary, making it more challenging for anyone intends to commit similar crimes.

It is true that users can see all of these pictures when they use the app, but the company never allows anyone to gather that many images without the consent of their owners. Each user can only see people within a 160-km radius from where they are.

DeVera also said that it was scary thinking that someone specially targeted female users.

Since the photos are sorted by user IDs as well as whether there are faces in the pictures, we have reason to believe that whoever stole them might want to sell them for someone to train a facial recognition system.

However, the threat does not stop there. Datasets of human faces are usually a great source for bad actors to create fake accounts online.

Facebook data breach 2018 and Equifax data breach in 2017 are both serious offenses so that we never forget how vulnerable our information is online.

Facial recognition has been an ongoing concern in the last few years. We have not had proper guidelines on the use of the tech yet and there has been no law to protect people’s rights and privacy when the technology is applied.

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